The Other Side of Hope

Winner of the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, the new film from Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre) intertwines the stories of two itinerant protagonists: Khaled (Sherwan Haji), a young Syrian refugee who drifts into Helsinki harbour as a stowaway; and Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen), a travelling salesman turned restaurateur, who finds Khaled sleeping outside his diner and hires him as a cleaner and dishwasher. “The issue of migrants and refugees [may] still be something from which cinema mostly averts its gaze, [but] not Kaurismäki’s cinema…. His humane comedy [has] absorbed this idea, [and] in fact embraced it with almost miraculous ease and simplicity” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian).